[et-mgmt-tools] CFT Support for OSX

[David Lutterkort]

On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 20:15 -0700, Rizwan Kassim wrote:
> I've started using CFT on some of our Linux machines - it's quite impressive.

Thanks :)

> I'm not a skilled Ruby developer by any means, but iI'll give it a
> shot (along with my other projects - this probably won't be a fast
> thing to do). David suggested I email the list.

For file change notifications, have you looked if FAM is available for
OS/X ? SGI's site[1] claims there is support for a number of *BSD's,
though I have no idea whether any of that works on OS X.

> I suppose a great way to start would be to better understand what CFT
> needs from ruby-fam? Does it just need file modification events or the
> content of the modification as well?

It only needs notification that a modification has occurred; the FAM
specific code is in lib/cft.rb.

It uses the following features of FAM:

      * Notification that a file has been changed, added, or deleted
      * Tell FAM to watch a file and a directory; cancel those watches

Besides getting your hands on a FAM-equivalent, there's a few RedHatisms
in the code, most notably, that cft will hunt through the RPM database
to notice package install/uninstall/update and to suppress notifications
if a file has changed solely because of a package operation. That part
doens't make much sense on OS/X. It should be relatively easy to
suppress that functionality based on testing whether RPM is on the
system or not.

Most of the other things that cft notices, e.g. service restarts, are
based on Puppet, and therefore should work on OS/X.

David

[1] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/